"emotions are viewed as having evolved throughout their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life tasks."
The two key issues addressed in this article are: there are a number of separate emotions which differ one from another in important ways and evolution played an important role in shaping both the unique and the common features which these emotions display as well as their current function.
Ekman does not think emotions are solely based on evolution. He believes there is an innate emotional base we are born with and that our emotions develop through social learning.
Emotional families are defined as a group of emotions that carry the same characteristics such as commonalities in expression, in physiological activity, in nature of the antecedent events and the appraisal process. "each emotion family can be considered to constitute a theme and variations. Theses are evolutionary based and variations are learned.
In positive psychology half of your emotion is predetermined by genetics and then 10% is situational and 40% is self determined and you can make cognitive decisions to change and improve.
There are nin characteristics which distinguish basic emotions:
Distinctive universal signals
Presence in other primates
Distinctive physiology
Distinctive universals in antecedent events
Coherence among emotional response
Quick onset
Brief duration
Automatic appraisal
Unburden occurence
In the 1990s, Ekman expanded his list of basic emotions, including a range of positive and negative emotions that are not all encoded in facial muscles.[12[[home#cite_note-12|]]] The newly included emotions are: [[/wiki/Amusement|Amusement]], [[/wiki/Contempt|Contempt]], [[/wiki/Contentment|Contentment]], [[/wiki/Embarrassment|Embarrassment]], [[/wiki/Anxiety|Excitement]], [[/wiki/Guilt_(emotion)|Guilt]], [[/wiki/Pride|Pride in achievement]], [[/wiki/Relief|Relief]], [[/wiki/Contentment|Satisfaction]], [[/wiki/Pleasure|Sensory pleasure]], and [[/wiki/Shame|Shame]].
Contributions to Our Understanding of Emotion
In his 1993 seminal paper in the psychology journal [[/wiki/American_Psychologist|American Psychologist]], Ekman describes nine direct contributions that his research on facial expression has made to our understanding of emotion.[21[[home#cite_note-21|]]] Highlights include:
Consideration of both nature and nurture: Emotion is now viewed as a [[/wiki/Physiological|physiological]] phenomenon influenced by our cultural and learning experiences.
Emotion-specific physiology: Ekman led the way by trying to find discrete [[/wiki/Psychophysiological|psychophysiological]] differences across emotions. A number of researchers continue to search for emotion-specific autonomic and [[/wiki/Central_nervous_system|central nervous system]] activations. With the advent of [[/wiki/Neuroimaging|neuroimaging]] techniques, a topic of intense interest revolves around how specific emotions relate to physiological activations in certain brain areas. Ekman laid the groundwork for the future field of [[/wiki/Affective_neuroscience|affective neuroscience]].
An examination of events that precede emotions: Ekman's finding that voluntarily making one of the universal facial expressions can generate the physiology and some of the subjective experience of emotion provided some difficulty for some of the earlier theoretical conceptualizations of experiencing emotions.
Considering emotions as families: Ekman & Friesen (1978) found not one expression for each emotion, but a variety of related but visually different expressions. For example, the authors reported 60 variations of the anger expression which share core configurational properties and distinguish themselves clearly from the families of fearful expressions, disgust expressions, and so on. Variations within a family likely reflect the intensity of the emotion, how the emotion is controlled, whether it is simulated or spontaneous, and the specifics of the event that provoked the emotion.
The two key issues addressed in this article are: there are a number of separate emotions which differ one from another in important ways and evolution played an important role in shaping both the unique and the common features which these emotions display as well as their current function.
Ekman does not think emotions are solely based on evolution. He believes there is an innate emotional base we are born with and that our emotions develop through social learning.
Emotional families are defined as a group of emotions that carry the same characteristics such as commonalities in expression, in physiological activity, in nature of the antecedent events and the appraisal process. "each emotion family can be considered to constitute a theme and variations. Theses are evolutionary based and variations are learned.
In positive psychology half of your emotion is predetermined by genetics and then 10% is situational and 40% is self determined and you can make cognitive decisions to change and improve.
There are nin characteristics which distinguish basic emotions:
Distinctive universal signals
Presence in other primates
Distinctive physiology
Distinctive universals in antecedent events
Coherence among emotional response
Quick onset
Brief duration
Automatic appraisal
Unburden occurence
In the 1990s, Ekman expanded his list of basic emotions, including a range of positive and negative emotions that are not all encoded in facial muscles.[12[[home#cite_note-12|]]] The newly included emotions are: [[/wiki/Amusement|Amusement]], [[/wiki/Contempt|Contempt]], [[/wiki/Contentment|Contentment]], [[/wiki/Embarrassment|Embarrassment]], [[/wiki/Anxiety|Excitement]], [[/wiki/Guilt_(emotion)|Guilt]], [[/wiki/Pride|Pride in achievement]], [[/wiki/Relief|Relief]], [[/wiki/Contentment|Satisfaction]], [[/wiki/Pleasure|Sensory pleasure]], and [[/wiki/Shame|Shame]].
Contributions to Our Understanding of Emotion
In his 1993 seminal paper in the psychology journal [[/wiki/American_Psychologist|American Psychologist]], Ekman describes nine direct contributions that his research on facial expression has made to our understanding of emotion.[21[[home#cite_note-21|]]] Highlights include:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjDhyfxyJCg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_W_2asdJbs